Courageous the Movie
Sherwood Pictures appears to have hit another home run with their film Courageous, to be released on September 30, 2011.
I have not had the opportunity to preview the film, but the trailers are in the same league as their recent movie Fireproof and previous to that Facing the Giants. I will also put in a plug for Flywheel, which I believe was their first film, and has an amazing story line and lesson, just as the aforementioned films.
One thing I do know about Courageous is that it encourages men to make a difference in their relationships with their kids. I started Fathers with Influence with the same purpose.
Several years ago I hosted a Father’s and Son’s night, once a month, where as Dad’s we would get together and chat, have meals together then rope in the boys for a short bible study time. This was nothing formal with the boys, since they were young and had the attention span of a fly, but we wanted to engage them in the bible, model for them that their Dad’s read the bible too, and be there to answer questions and solidify their faith in Christ.
For the short time our group was in place, it made a definite impact on the boys. Today, they are still good friends, and I enjoy chatting with the dads.
Why did we stop the group? Our church at the time was undergoing pastoral changes and that affected the small groups. Since then our family started attending another church and the group fizzled out. Excuses, I know.
One issue I found with men is that for some reason they tend to shy away from meeting other men and forging new friendships and bonds. I know men are busy and have other friends, tee times and myriad of other activities, and to pile on another is exhausting.
But our kids need us today. Kids need a Father as a role model. They need to see us in the word, in prayer, and in love with their mom. They need to have time with us to learn what we know. To repeat the things we do well, and be warned of the mistakes we made. Our kids need to see other men acting the same way with their kids.
We have a valuable opportunity to impact the next generation in a positive way by hosting or attending a Fathers and Son’s night. It’s easy to start, and one of the best ways to get men there is with food. But don’t stop at feeding the belly, feed the soul too. Read the bible, pray for each other and engage your boys.
All of this was really just to say: Go see Courageous the Movie! Take your kids and wife with you and let God work in you through this film, and I pray that he will positively impact the life of your family through this movie.
My Son’s Interpretation of Psalm 23
Tonight, over dinner, we discussed our daily bible reading which was Psalm 23. At times I am speechless when my kids interpret scripture, and today was one of those days.
As my oldest son traversed the chapter, he talked about how God does not want us to rely on things to be happy, but to rely on Him. My youngest son then talked about walking through the valley of the shadow of death and how God protects us from the things of this dark world, if we allow Him. Then my oldest indicated that if we trust and follow God, then goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life.
Although the above interpretations are not deeply theological and have so many more meanings than our discussion uncovered, my son knocked it out of the park with his concluding statement.
He set down his fork and knife and looked at me with steadfast eyes. Then he said, “You know what Psalm 23 is?”
“No, tell me.” I replied
He continued with confidence, “Psalm 23 encompasses the whole bible.”
I thought about that for a moment and then it hit me. Wow! That’s amazing. And when you read it and really take the time to understand the implication of this Psalm, you realize that this is who God made us to be when he created Adam and Eve.
The Lord is our shepherd and will guide us, but then we sin, so He restores our soul and leads us through a path of righteousness for his name’s sake (Jesus). Walking in the valley of the shadow of death is living life on earth, having comfort that Jesus is with us.
He will prepare a table for us, as it is said that all believers who repent their sins and believe will be written in the book of life. And finally, I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever, which is God’s promise of eternal salvation with Him.
And that is the bible, all wrapped up in Psalm 23, as wisely stated by a fourteen year old.
Psalm 23
A Psalm of David.
1 The LORD is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
2 He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters.
3 He restores my soul;
He leads me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup runs over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life;
And I will dwell in the house of the LORD
Forever.
Comments are welcome:
The Best Father’s Day Gift
When I was a kid, I spent most summers with my Dad in the lumber yard and wood shop that he owned in Arizona. I was between the ages of eight and fourteen when he ran his business and I meant more to be with him than it did if he had a job and I would have had to wait around for him to get home. My Dad was a great Dad, we had so much fun together. I remember going to the zoo and he would teach me about photography. Sometimes after work we would stop by the ice cream shop and get a chocolate covered banana. Other times we would stop by the hobby shop.
My Dad was a guest on a local AM radio talk show in Phoenix where he would answer people’s questions about wood. I felt so important sitting in the studio with him listening to him answer questions. I had to be as quiet as possible so the mic would not pick up any noise. But the best part about the time is the studio is that my Dad thought I was important enough to bring along with him. He did not treat me like a third wheel by making me stay at home and waiting for him to get back from his commitments.
My father passed away almost eleven years ago, and I still miss calling him to wish him a Happy Father’s Day. I knew my Dad loved me because of his big hugs and his constant reminder of how much he loved me. That legacy I continue with my kids, as well as allowing them to be in my life as much I possibly can. They will grow up and go to college, get a job and get married in just a few short years. In the mean time, I want to give them what my Dad gave me. To know that I love them and will do everything to be with them as much as I can. And for me, that’s what Father’s day is all about.
On Father’s Day Sunday, when I walked into the living room, my kids greeted me with shouts of “Happy Father’s Day!” as they ran up to me with their hand-made cards in hand, each wanting me to see theirs first. The cards were thoughtful and captured each child’s unique expression of love. We had a lazy day which included swimming, a movie, chess and BBQ Steaks. I did not get a MacBook Pro, or a Shelby Mustang or a weekend in Hawaii, but what I had was my family.
Then I think if we are mere man, and God is so much greater, how much more should we want to spend time with Him and soak in his love for us? I am submissively grateful to God for his promise of eternal salvation for those who believe, and that’s the best gift I could ever receive on Father’s Day.
Zephaniah 3:17 - “The LORD your God in your midst, The Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.”
Why Did God Make Us Stupid?
My youngest son asked me this question along with three others, and instead of blowing him off, I wanted to give him a thoughtful answer.
Looking in Genesis 3:5 we find that this struggle occurred in the very beginning:
“For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (emphasis added)
If God made us to know everything, including the number of grains of sand on a beach, or how many planets there are in the universe or how many hairs each person has on their head (mine could be counted on two hands) , then we would all know that God exists. If we all knew God existed, because of an infinite mind, then we would be His robots and would not be free to love Him, as He desires us to do.
But because God loves us and wants us to love Him back, He gave us free will so we could choose to love Him. And with this responsibility comes a finite mind.
In the book of Job, God reprimands Job because of his pride in telling his friends how much he knows. Reading Job 38:4 we find God saying:
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding.”
Chapters 38 through 41 shows God posing questions like this to Job. I would encourage you to read through it to gain an understanding of God’s knowledge compared to ours. But the point here is that man’s pride gets in the way of truly accepting that God does know all and we don’t.
Back to my son’s point about not being smart, compared to God, he is right. But when we look at what God gave us the ability to do, it is astounding.
We have sent man to the moon, an R/C car on Mars, computers and graphics that make pictures and movies look real. Hand held devices with touch screens. Cars, airplanes and so many things man has created with his mind. And God allowed us the ability to use our minds for great things.
But if our great minds turn our hearts away from God, then I would contend that is when our smarts are really in question.
Job 42
1 Then Job answered the LORD and said:
2 “I know that You can do everything,
And that no purpose of Yours can be withheld from You.
3 You asked, ‘Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
4 Listen, please, and let me speak;
You said, ‘I will question you, and you shall answer Me.’
5 “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees You.
6 Therefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.”
Your comments are appreciated:
Why Did God Create No End To Time?
My youngest son asks some tough questions, and when he does, I want to be able to give him an answer, or help him find one. My concern with Christianity is people are turned away from a faith in Jesus because tough questions are not be being dealt with seriously.
As I have written in my previous posts, man does not know all the answers, because God does not reveal them to us. In this post, I will attempt to answer the question posed in the title. I am not a Quantum Physicist nor a Philosopher, and if I were, there would be plenty of points to agree and disagree with on both sides. But first, let me ask a question: “What is time?”
Now seriously think about the question. Does time come from a watch? Well, it can’t because if a watch stops, time doesn’t. Does it come from planets spinning around each other? That can’t be it either, because if all the planets stopped, our lives would not stop. I’m sure weird and strange things would happen on earth, but they would happen after the planets stopped spinning.
In theory, if twins were born and one was placed in a spacecraft at the speed of light for a certain period of time and then arrived back at earth, he would arrive back at earth younger that his sibling. To my knowledge this test has not been performed, thus the reference to being a theory.
A proven scientific fact, called “time dilation”, apparently discovered by Albert Einstein, shows that time speeds up based on higher elevation. For example, a clock on the west coast of California will be slower than a clock in the rocky mountains of Colorado. To be fair, the time difference works out to about less than one second over an extended period of time, but it is significant enough that satellites need to be re-calibrated on a regular basis to “correct” this phenomenon.
As noted in yesterday’s post, time is a dimension. Yet time is not consistent with itself in its own dimension, so we either cannot measure time correctly or time cannot be measured in a way that we understand.
In either case as long as the time dimension exists, there will never be an end to time. This statement my be correlated to yesterday’s post regarding no end to space. Think of it this way. We know there will be the year 2012, but we have not lived it, and we are unsure of what will happen in the future. We do know that now exists, but tomorrow we will have a new now, just as in yesterday’s post I talked about the universe expanding to new limits and never ending. Time and the universe seem to be the same. Both expanding every day, but never expanding into a barrier, yet charting a new path every moment.
God created no ending to time, because He created a beginning. Once time starts, it cannot stop, unless God stops it. I don’t know if He ever will, but I would imagine that if God created the third dimension, it is important, and it will continue on forever. However forever is not yet here, so we can only believe that tomorrow will bring us another day into forever.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 – “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
Post your comments below:
Why Did God Create An Infinite Universe?
Have you ever thought about the universe? As a kid I would think about traveling in space and then bumping into infinity, like a brick wall. Then I would think about what is on the other side of the brick wall, which would be more space, or an infinite amount of cement.
This question is the second of four that my youngest son asked in response to me telling my children to ask me the hard questions.
First I will add the disclaimer that I am not an Astrophysicist and do not claim to know even a small fraction of a percentage about this science. My knowledge is based on what I know from the bible as well as the Astronomy class I almost failed in college twenty years ago.
To that extent, my first comment is, “How do we know the universe does not end?”
I have read that the universe is still expanding, according to scientists. If it is expanding, then there is an end, its just that the end keeps getting further and further away.
I think of it this way. The big bang happened (meaning God spoke it into existence, Genesis 1:1). And like any explosion, the initial blast occurs the fastest, and will continue, but slows down over time.
Based on this observation, and the fact that we do not know what is on the outer edges of space (has anyone been there to see it?), it seems logical that space continues to expand.
Maybe the confusion about an infinite Universe is combining “Heaven” with “outer space”, and if believers will spend eternity, in heaven, with God after their life on earth, those two separate logic streams could cross and become one.
For us, our life has a beginning point and an ending point in the world as we know it, however, once we pass out of this world, we will enter eternity. For believers, eternity will be with God, and for the non-believers, eternity will be hell, or separation from God, either way, we will endure eternity.
The continual reference to infinity now begs the question, “What is infinity?” As we all should remember from Junior High, infinity is a number that goes on forever (or a luxury car produced by Nissan). If we correlate infinity with time, now we can see infinity stretching forever, with no end. At this point, we should be reminded that there are 10 dimensions, of which we can describe three of them and have a hard time describing the fourth, but cannot wrap our minds around five through ten.
The point being here, we live in a time dimension. We were born in a point of time, we were married at some point in time, and we will not live a worldly life forever. If we remove the dimension of time from the equation, eternity is still endless, but it is not bound by time.
Think of it this way. You are in a car on a freeway driving one hundred miles north. The road is clear and you should arrive at your destination in just under two hours. But you can only see several miles ahead. At the same time a pilot is flying his plane at ten thousand feet above you. He can see that in twenty miles there is an accident. He knows in advance what you do not already know. This pilot can see your future.
I realize that example still happens under the dimension of time, but if you are removed from the time dimension when you die, then it would make sense that you could almost see your life play out like a movie, where you can view your life at any point in “time”, looking at it from a vantage point that you do not have while immersed in the dimension of time.
Another example is love. Our love for God should be never ending and all encompassing, just as his love is for us. The same goes for our spouse and kids, we love them unconditionally. When we die our worldly death does our love die also? Love is not bound by time, and neither is God or heaven.
To ties this up, God created a universe that would continue to expand. For what reason? We can ask God when we get to heaven, for now, I will trust his word. If we separate the time dimension from eternity or infinity, we can see that our entry into heaven is with God who has no beginning and no end, and all of that will be happening in the realm of the love of God, which has no finite qualities.
Is what I am saying true and correct? Probably not. Only God knows the real answer. The problem is when the secular world turns their back on God because they cannot find an definitive answer. Then they take a scientific approach and convince others that God does not exist because they make their assumptions appear as fact, and that is a dangerous ideology to play around with.
I’ll end with this. If we knew the definite answer to this question, would our lives be better? Do we have to know everything in order live a happy life? If we knew everything then we would know God exists, and if we knew God exists, belief would not come from the faith that God allowed us choose based on free will.
Isaiah 55:9 – “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this subject, and would encourage you to post them below.
Why Did God Create Us?
My youngest son ponders some tough questions, and this is one of them. My gut reaction to his question was, “Because God loves us and wants us to be with him.” This response was not satisfactory enough, so he repeated the question.
Many times when faced with questions like this I take a step back and look at what we do, as humans, since God created us in his image. Please do not get me wrong, I am not placing myself or others in place of God, but as an analogy sometimes its easier to for my mind to understand.
The first person that comes to mind is Henry Ford. Why did Henry Ford make cars? Was it because he had nothing else better to do? Was it because he was lonely? No. He created cars because he could. He wanted his cars to make his life more enjoyable and for his pleasure. He wanted to make life better.
As a parent, why do we have kids? Is because we want maids and butlers and busy little helpers? No. We have children so that we can love them and they can love us back. We want them to make our lives better, and to teach them and help them grow into responsible people who love God.
So why did God create us? The bottom line is that God does not need us. He was not lonely. If He wanted companionship, he could have just stopped with man’s best friend.
Revelation 4:11 says:
“Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” (emphasis added)
God created us for His pleasure. Yet instead of just creating a robot that would love him, he gave us the choice to believe and trust in Him so that we could dwell with Him forever in heaven.
Next time you look in the mirror, realize that God created you because he wants a personal relationship with you. Spend time with him, just as you enjoy spending time with your friends and family. This is what God desires.
Genesis 1:27 – “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.“
Post your comments below:
Four Tough Questions For Christians
The other day I stumbled upon an atheist’s blog and read a post about when the author knew he lost his faith in God. Then he asked readers to post their “testimony” of when they stopped believing in God. After reviewing many comments, the common age in which faith was lost was thirteen years old. The reason for their lost faith boiled down to one reason: the church could not satisfactorily answer their tough questions.
My oldest son is thirteen, almost fourteen, and last year around his thirteenth birthday he told us, “I don’t want to be a devout Christian when I grow up. I just want to work, make a lot of money and believe in Jesus, but I don’t want to go to church.” My wife and I were devastated by this comment. We try to instill God and faith in everything we do. But we also know that if God gave us free will to do as we please, then my wife and I are completely powerless in making that decision for our child. However, we made some corrections and my son is enjoying church again, but after reading the atheist’s post, I realized that he may not be getting his questions answered. Additionally, he may not want to ask us these types of hard questions for fear that his perception may cause a negative reaction from us.
Because we have three kids, I wanted to let each of them know that their parents are available to answer any questions they might have, and if they think we will get mad at them for asking us, I want them to ask the question anyway and I promised not to be mad. Over dinner I opened up this conversation and my youngest son, age ten, was the first to blurt out four questions:
- Why did God create us?
- Why did God create the universe with no end?
- Why did God create no end to time?
- Why did God make us with so little smarts?
These four questions are tough questions. As I gave reasons for number two above, my son continued to ask the same question. He would say, “I know what you are saying, Dad, but why does the universe have no end? It has to stop, and if it does there has to be something on the other side. How does it just keep going?”
As a kid, I pondered the size of the universe in the same way, although I did not consider the God aspect, since I was not a believer until I was twenty-two (or a few years later when I really gained traction with my faith). I would get to the point where I felt so small and insignificant, then I almost became claustrophobic thinking of little me, on this little earth somewhere in a vast universe that never ended.
For the next four posts, I will address each one of these. I bet my readers have struggled with similar questions, so I feel compelled to post my response each one. However, with each one, I would greatly appreciate your feedback because I am not an astrophysicist nor a theologian, and you may have a perspective that I miss.
Acts 17:11 – “These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.” (emphasis added)
Do you have unanswered questions? Post them below:
What Would God Have To Do For You To Believe?
This is a favorite question of mine when people ask how to know if God is real. Usually I get an answer to the affect of “maybe turn water into wine.” That’s a great answer, and I would probably answer the same. Then I ask if Jesus were to come to earth today and turn water into wine for them, how would they convince their friends that Jesus was real? The answer is usually, “My friends would have to see it also.”
Doing Virtuous Business: Book Review
In “Doing Virtuous Business” by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, the author suggests that business that are owned and operated with “spiritual capital” have a track record of success and better profits.
Today I read headlines and hear news condemning profits in America’s largest companies. While focusing on profit as a sole responsibility and goal of a company is what gets companies in trouble these days, leaders with a spiritual intent tend to focus on serving God, customers, employees and quality of products or services. If “spiritual capital” is invested in the business, then profits will follow.
